‘My life is just too beautiful, too good, I’m too happy to have anybody come and pee on my parade.’
Los Angeles – Charlize Theron walks into a room with confidence, donning a short-cropped blonde hair with bangs.
This stunning beauty and brains is also co-producer of her latest drama, “Bombshell,” where she also stars as Megyn Kelly together with her handpicked choices, co-stars Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson and Margot Robbie as Kayla Pospisil.
The Jay Roach-helmed film, which is based upon several women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, was first announced in May 2017 following the death of Ailes.
Did she ever contact Megyn Kelly for the project?
“No I didn’t,” the 44-year-old Charlize revealed. “It was important for us to reach out to as many people who were willing to share their stories with us and a lot of women stepped forward at Fox News.
“Some of them took a tremendous risk to step forward. So it was early on that Jay and (writer) Charles (Randolph) and I really decided that we had to take it seriously and we had to protect our sources and that we were actually going about this in an investigative way as journalists that we couldn’t be part of outing the women who had NDA’s. I knew early on just because I decided to play her that it would probably not be beneficial for me to sit down with her. I had access to a lot of information, a lot of people who knew her and I worked from that place because there’s a lot of pressure.
“I also was respectful of her in the sense that I didn’t want to put that on her. I didn’t want her to feel like somehow she owed me something or that I would somehow hurt her feelings if I found something contradictory, it gets very messy. So I got access to as much information through different avenues that I can’t really address. But I took it really seriously. I knew that I had to go deeper than just what was out there and did that with a lot of people who were willing to help me and I’m incredibly grateful and indebted to them.”
Charlize Theron (Photo courtesy of Janet R. Nepales/HFPA)
Asked what her most important quality was that allowed her to be an actress that everyone would like to work with and become a powerful producer in Hollywood, Charlize answered, “It’s a combination of a lot of stuff, right? I mean I’m fully aware of the kindness and mercy and grace of a lot of people who took me under their wing, believed in me, encouraged me, helped me, created opportunity for me—to think that I did all of this on my own would be a huge misconception.
“And I think there’s a quality that all South Africans have just by naturally being born in the country of South Africa, and that’s resilience. And I think that played a little bit of a role and I was just never willing to kind of roll over and stop and I’m grateful for having that in me and I think I really credit my country for that because growing up in that country it taught me to be tenacious and to not just cower at the sight of anything that just felt like an obstacle.
“But I am always the first to acknowledge that I am here because of the grace of a lot of people who believed in me. And when you have that, I think it makes you realize that you can’t mess up and you have to work even harder because I feel a responsibility to those people who believed in me and kind of gave their time and energy and opportunity to me to do something really good with it.”
With her amazing career, and being a mom and activist as well, do men respond to her or are they intimidated?
“I think a huge part of a lot of my relationships that I’ve had with men have definitely been me being hyperaware that there was an element of me living my full potential that felt somewhat threatening. And I think in my 20s, I feel like I had this need to play that role of, kind of, modulating myself, depending on the relationship. And I remember a lot of times thinking to myself, like if I could just make myself a little bit smaller, like my relationship would be great. And ultimately I think the older I’ve become the more I realize that that’s just not true to me. And I don’t want to end my life feeling that I did something to hold myself back, there’s no value in that. And ultimately, I am hoping that I will meet somebody who is thrilled by all of those things that I have to offer. And I am also now at an age where until that happens, I’m just not willing to settle anymore. My life is just too beautiful, too good, I’m too happy to have anybody come and pee on my parade.”